I'm less worried about crazy teachers than I am about the ones who are unwilling to use the gun, which simply adds another available gun to the proceedings, and the teachers who would be unwilling to shoot their students who may attack them in order to get a gun.

I know teachers of inner-city kids who are already afraid of several of their students without giving those students incentive to attack them.

Koatanga wrote:I'm less worried about crazy teachers than I am about the ones who are unwilling to use the gun,

Completely agree. No one should be compelled to carry a firearm, especially if they are unwilling and untrained.

i agree as well, which is why i said those that are against it (or just dont want to participate) dont have tothose that do get training

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Ugh. This thread is doing my head in. The culture difference between the US and just about everyone else is fucking insane. Honestly the fact that "Let's arm all the teachers, that seems like a great idea" is just repulsive to me. The answer to gun violence is more guns? Okay. Makes perfect sense.

There are far more cases where teachers have nervous breakdowns (and I've actually used the Amy Bishop incident in a paper arguing against tenure) than teachers that go on shooting rampages. Having seen a couple of psychotic breaks in patients over the years - remember, I work in emergency response - I wouldn't doubt that, had a gun been handy the person having the break would have used it. They'd have picked it up, pointed at someone, and pulled the trigger until it went click.

Also knowing the stress that teachers are put under and how much more likely they are to HAVE those nervous breakdowns, I wouldn't want teachers - at ANY level - to be armed. Because if it's not pressure from the tenure committee at the college level, it's pressure from helicopter parents and school administration at the K-12 level. Which is worse? I don't know, but I do know that I'd rather not have guns in the hands of teachers. Or students, for that matter. I'm not against guns on campuses; I am against guns in the hands of individuals prone to psychotic breaks.

Like I said - give them to the support staff. Secretaries, janitors, lunch servers, groundskeepers - but keep them out of high stress environments. Civilians aren't trained to respond well at all to stress, and aren't watchdogged like police officers and members of the military.

- I'm not Jesus, but I can turn water into Kool-Aid.- A Sergeant in motion outranks an officer who doesn't know what the hell is going on.- A demolitions specialist at a flat run outranks everybody.

I'd like to see a response to this from the other side...because I don't think there is one.

I'd say that it's a piece written by somebody with a really great understanding of guns and a really poor understanding of people who misuse them. He even admits as much:

I am not an expert on mental health issues or psychiatry or psychology. My knowledge of criminal psychology is limited to understanding the methods of killers enough to know how to fight them better. So since I don’t have enough first-hand knowledge about this topic to comment intelligently, then I’m not going to comment…

Which leads to bullshit like this:

Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period.

Think about it. You are a violent, homicidal madman, looking to make a statement and hoping to go from disaffected loser to most famous person in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals is to kill a whole bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all these people? Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back.

In all honesty I have no respect for anybody who believes Gun Free Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies, up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because there is a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off vampires. It is wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking at that.

The only people who obey No Guns signs are people who obey the law. People who obey the law aren’t going on rampages.

If claiming that 'No Guns' signs repel mass shooters is delusional, then claiming that they attract them is doubly so.

Mentally ill people who decide to end it all and take a few people along with them don't sit around like theorycrafters, evaluating strategies that will result in optimal Kill/Death and Fame per Second ratios. Despite Mr. Correia's scaremongering, there's no evidence that they specifically target Gun-Free Zones. Rather, they tend to go for locations that have some personal significance to them - like a workplace or school that they or someone they know has attended.

And if 'No Guns' signs are irrelevant either way, then so are the ones that say 'Our Staff Are Trained & Heavily Armed', as evidenced by the fact that most mass shooters end up either killing themselves or getting killed by the police. The only people who are deterred by "We're Armed & Dangerous" signs are people who care about their health and wellbeing. People who care about their health and wellbeing don't go on rampages.

fuzzygeek wrote:Let's discuss the assertion you think I am making: that preventing spree killers is worth Joe Bob shooting his neighbor for playing Nickleback cranked up to eleven. Are you arguing that we should make ourselves defenseless to spree shooters because Joe Bob might shoot Jim Bob? Is that your counter assertion?

I'm saying that you better have an iron-clad case that arming civilians actually has a significant effect on spree shooters, because there is undisputably a cost in lives of having so many armed civilians around.

And I'm not sure how to examine something like this statistically. We can look at spree shootings and look at the average number of fatalities when someone else is armed (2.33 deaths) and when only the shooter is armed (14.20 deaths); some guy looked at 100 shootings and did some math here: http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/07/31/au ... tatistics/ I haven't closely examined his primary data, but scanning through his methodology he does not appear to be cherry picking. Does this qualify as a "scientific study?"

It's a good start, but the results are, as they say, inconclusive. In 11 of the 17 incidents that were stopped by civilians, they didn't even have any guns. Of the remaining 6 incidents, 3 of them were stopped by armed civilians who never fired a shot. It's not totally clear from the post, but the remaining incidents seem to be:

- Kiarron Parker. According to this he was stopped by an off-duty police officer, so either I'm missing a case or the author of the review mistakenly labeled this as a shooting stopped by an armed civilian.

- Matthew Murray. Shot by ex-cop Jean Assam. Did I miss another case?

- David Hernandez Arroyo. Mark Wilson, an actual armed civilian without any law enforcement experience, shot and wounded him, but was killed in return. Police later stopped Arroyo.

Well, hell. Could somebody else check the study? Because as far as I can see if fails to list a single incident where an armed civilian has actually opened fire on a shooter and stopped him.

What the study proves is that armed civilians have a role in apprehending shooters who actually don't want to die. They have extremely limited effect on crazies on a murder/suicide spree.

Fivelives wrote:Civilians aren't trained to respond well at all to stress

Maybe we should change that? I suspect that, if every person was trained in various stress management and coping techniques as a part of their basic education, that would reduce the overall level of violence in the society more than any law.

Fivelives wrote:Civilians aren't trained to respond well at all to stress

Maybe we should change that? I suspect that, if every person was trained in various stress management and coping techniques as a part of their basic education, that would reduce the overall level of violence in the society more than any law.

That would be an amazing idea.

- I'm not Jesus, but I can turn water into Kool-Aid.- A Sergeant in motion outranks an officer who doesn't know what the hell is going on.- A demolitions specialist at a flat run outranks everybody.

I've been mostly staying out of this debate because I think it misses the point completely.

I'm a security professional. One of the big scenarios that is part of my job description to train for is to locate, isolate, contain, and eliminate rogue gunmen (or a group of them) in my facility. I fire more rounds in training per year than most gun owners fire in a lifetime, and most of that training is in rapid reaction speed drills; the type of marksmanship that would be required against a rogue shooter.

The vast majority of people, even the vast majority of gun owners, would not be able to effectively do the kind of job that I do in fighting off a random gunman in a building. Real life is not like the movies or like The Walking Dead where a random civilian can run around firing a pistol one handed and hit nothing but zombie headshots. A "good guy" gunman verses a "bad guy" gunman in a school equals a LOT of stray bullets. And potentially a LOT of collateral damage. That's a totally unacceptable strategy.

And it turns out, there are much better options.

I went to school in San Diego, California in the early 2000's, during a rash of school shootings. School shootings got so commonplace at one point that the media barely even continued reporting on them. So if we want to actually prevent tragedies like the one in Connecticut, we can learn the lessons of that time period.

When 9/11 happened, a few passengers hijacked an airplane using boxcutters. The solution wasn't to arm all passengers (or all air crew) with knives of their own, so that we can have West Side Story rumbles in jumbo jets and end up with a bunch of people getting shanked. The solution was to harden cockpit doors against intrusion, and train air crew not to ever open those cockpit doors while in flight. The same solution held true in my school district in San Diego.

All you need to stop a rogue gunman in a school are well-drilled teachers and sturdy classroom doors. When gunshots are heard, or when someone gets on the PA system and gives a trigger-word announcement, you turn off the classroom lights, lock the door, lower all the blinds, and stack all the people against the wall with the door in it so they are out of sight. From the corridor, the classroom appears empty and unoccupied. The door is locked, and the shooter (under the pressure of rapidly decreasing time until the police arrive) will not invest the time required to try and break in, but will instead move on.

Everybody does this, and the gunman will be left wandering the hallways, faced with a front of locked doors that each would take time to break in to, and no clear indicators of which ones contain people. Past experience shows that, under these circumstances, the shooter will either flee the school or give up and commit suicide, especially once the authorities arrive.

That's all you need. Sturdy wooden classroom doors with no windows in them. Conduct an Intruder Drill once every semester just like you do Fire Drills, to make sure everyone is familiar with the proceedure. Delay the shooter 10, maybe 15 minutes.

The great thing about this strategy is that it works just as well even if the shooter is a student at the school and familiar with it. It's proven to work. It requires very little change from current practice, and no added guns or risky engagements that potentially just add to the body count. If a teacher feels particularly defensive, they can position themselves next to the inside of their door with a baseball bat, or push their desk up against the door.

The whole "we should arm teachers" concept is just silly. A school is probably the worst possible place to get into a gun fight.

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Fivelives wrote:I'm not against guns on campuses; I am against guns in the hands of individuals prone to psychotic breaks.

Like I said - give them to the support staff. Secretaries, janitors, lunch servers, groundskeepers - but keep them out of high stress environments. Civilians aren't trained to respond well at all to stress, and aren't watchdogged like police officers and members of the military.

I don't know what kind of janitors and lunch ladies you had at YOUR schools, but in mine they tended to be either special needs or circus freaks.These are the people you want to arm?

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Shoju wrote:This wasn't evil. Mental Illness isn't "Evil". It's not the devil. It's not the fucking exorcist. It's real. It is indeed terrible, but not for the reasons that you might think.

I love this. My opinions have changed drastically over the past 6 and a half years. (since I gained custody of my son). The things that I'vew had to work through with him over his fucked up childhood has completely changed how I feel about things.

Somewhere, in between the two ideologies lampooned in this image, is a place where we can have reasonable, informed, non panic inducing dialogue about making sure that those in our society who need the help, can in fact get the help they need.